Inside the brains of mice and men alike, a relatively big football-shaped region called the thalamus acts like a switchboard, providing the prefrontal cortex, the part that does abstract thinking and decision-making, with most of its information. The thalamus's responsibility even includes helping the prefrontal cortex to maintain consciousness and arousal.

Researchers have discovered what may be the earliest dinosaur,
Nyasasaurus parringtoni, a creature the size of a Labrador retriever, but with a five foot-long tai. It walked the Earth about 10 million years before more familiar dinosaurs like the small, swift-footed Eoraptor and Herrerasaurus.

A survey published in Archives of Pediatrics&Adolescent Medicine
 finds that 14.2 percent of teenage children with any mental disorder have been treated with a psychotropic medication in the last 12 months, which researchers suggest challenges concerns about widespread overmedication and misuse of psychotropic medications among young people in the U.S.

Concern has been raised about inappropriate prescribing of psychotropic medications to children and adolescents, but those criticisms were based on anecdotal reports, studies of small unrepresentative clinical samples and secondary analyses of large databases on prescription drug use that lacked clinical information, the authors write in the study background.

Tornado-like vortexes can be produced in bizarre fluids which are controlled by quantum mechanics, completely unlike normal liquids.

There massed ranks of quantum twisters even  line up in rows on a semiconductor chip. By controlling where electrons move and how they interact with light the team created a marriage of electrons and photons that form a new quantum particle called a 'polariton'.

The results come from a collaboration between the experimental team in the NanoPhotonics Centre at Cambridge, led by Professor Jeremy Baumberg, and the theoretical quantum fluids group of Natalia Berloff.

A new analysis of topographic and gravity data from Titan, the largest moon orbiting Saturn,  indicates its icy outer crust is twice as thick as has generally been thought.

Is there a vast ocean of liquid water lies under the crust?. The new study suggests that the internally generated heat that keeps that ocean from freezing solid depends far more on Titan's interactions with Saturn and its other moons than had been suspected.